Four grown kids, five delightful grandchildren, constant, long-time partner. A retired academic, I'm adapting to life in a Vancouver condo after decades in a waterfront home on a very small (Canadian) West Coast island. Keen to discover what new priorities emerge, what interests persist, in this urban life after 60!

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Sunday, January 20, 2008

hats, movies, drinks, sushi, and music, glorious music

Yes, I finished Koolhaas, wove the ends in, and even took a self-portrait wearing it. Not sure if I'll keep it or put it in the gift pile. I used a leftover skein of Diamond Yarns Alpaca Peru and I love it in this pattern -- the alpaca provides enough stitch definition yet has a subtle halo, and it's lovely and warm. If I knit this pattern again, I'll do one more cable pattern -- here I did 4 rather than 5.

And I'm kicking myself that I didn't add this leftover skein to my Mission Possible list 'cause now I could be ticking one more item off. Oh well!

Random weekend items:

An interior designer writing in The Vancouver Sun on Friday about how to decorate a small space effectively was making a food analogy to illustrate the concept of combining too many disparate items. Her insufficiently edited menu included the following delightful dish: cocovan! At least her spelling reflects a decent French pronunciation, but I just see a brown Hippie vehicle.

Never did make it to see Juno, as I mentioned planning to. After a great visit with my soon-defending friend over drinks at The Sylvia (a fabulous ivy-clad, super-reasonably-priced Vancouver institution with bar seats right across the road from English Bay), I realized we'd already crammed so much into the weekend that I could let Juno wait. Instead, we walked a little over a block from our place to a new Japanese restaurant on Pacific and checked out their sushi -- nothing remarkable but the sashimi, rolls, gyoza, and prawn tempura were good, and service was very friendly. I suspect this will become a new fallback option for easy neighbourhood meals.

Then we went home to watch Daniel Auteil in Mon meilleur ami. Cute narrative, decent acting, some aural practice for our French (yes, we use the English subtitles, but we try our best to get the French as well)and, of course, the added fun of recognizing places we'd walked, such as over this bridge.

Also managed to get to the Roy Arden show which closed today at the Vancouver Art Gallery. I wish I'd got there earlier and then managed a repeat visit or two. Some of the things he does with colour are truly stunning, both colour and composition. And the cataloguing of Vancouver houses, changing streetscapes, the way his photographer's eye finds evidence in the urban wilds of habitats of the homeless. I bought the catalogue, partly because I feel as if I should know more about Arden's work and that of the Vancouver school, through the several essays included, but also just to spend more time with the work than I was able to yesterday.

Anyone who is in Vancouver between now and March might want to drive out to the Surrey Art Gallery to check out Janet Cardiff's sound installation, Forty-Part Motet. It's a gorgeous and engaging work consisting of 40 audio speakers, each of which plays a recording of a separate singer taking on a part of 16th-century composer Thomas Tallis's piece, Spem in Alium, and among which the listener can move, shifting to experience the effects of such movement on the received and perceived sound. Admittedly, the setting will not be comparable to the Rideau Chapel in the National Art Gallery in Ottawa where we heard this a few years back, but it's still a wonderful opportunity to experience technology enhancing the listening experience, warming it somehow, to pinpoint the individuals within the massed sound, and then to fold the individual voices back into a glorious whole. This installation has visited MOMA in New York as well as The Tate Gallery in London; it's the first time it's been in BC, and I'm not sure when, if ever, it will be back, so get yourselves out to Surrey if you can.

I love the Koolhaas hat. I've been meaning to give it a whirl, too, despite the fact that wool hats aren't much called for in the California climate. But it's too interesting to pass on. Love the color, too.

Thanks Gina (you know you're an enabler, right?) and Jillian and Bronwen.Puttermeister: that cracks me up! Glamorous, moi? Koolhaas was fun, altho' like Shedir, the cabling (without needles for me)gets tiring on the fingers after a while and I'd love a few more plain rows in between. I'll do another, for sure.

I'd love to hear your response to my post. Agree, disagree, even go off on a tangent, I love to know you're out there, readers. Let's chat, shall we? I apologize, though, for the temporary necessity of the Word Verification -- spam comments have been tiresomely numerous lately, and I'm hoping to break that pattern.

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Wisdom to live by and Other Clever Quotations

Events are not changeable at their climax, not through virtue and resolve, but only in their strictly ordinary, habitual course through reason and practice.Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," Address delivered at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, on 27 April 1934

Coherence is born of random abundance. Kim Stafford in The Muses Among UsThe world is so full of a number of thingsI'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child's Garden of Verses

Bourgeois heroism: the acrobatics of being in so many places practically at once, and doing so many amazing things in one day, and then conversing over dinner with unflagging energy.

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Unless otherwise stated, all words and photographs in this blog are my own. If you wish to use any of them, please give me credit for my work. And it should go without saying, but apparently needs to be said: Do not publish entire posts as your own. I will take the necessary action to stop such theft. Thanks.